The Trump administration is organizing a network of energy-producing states in the Caribbean to provide the region with a steady supply of fossil fuels, despite the environmental risks.

Hoping to sideline Venezuela, the oil-rich country that once provided the Caribbean with affordable supplies of oil, the Trump administration is working to position other oil-rich countries as the region’s primary suppliers of energy. Administration officials are particularly focused on Guyana and Suriname, two oil-rich countries that they hope the region’s leaders will embrace as alternatives to Venezuela.

“The fact that now their own countries—Guyana, Suriname—are able to have and really surpass Venezuela in its oil production and be able to work with its neighbors there in the region is a huge opportunity for the Caribbean,” U.S. Special Envoy for Latin America Mauricio Claver-Carone said at a March 25 press briefing.

Over the past two decades, the United States has engaged in a major rivalry with Venezuela for influence in the Caribbean. The U.S.-Venezuela rivalry has centered on oil, a fossil fuel that many Caribbean nations import to meet their energy needs.

Early in the twenty-first century, Venezuela took advantage of its vast oil reserves to become a major supplier of oil for the Caribbean. Under a program called Petrocaribe, Venezuela shared its oil wealth by providing Caribbean countries with shipments at low rates.

Many Caribbean countries embraced Petrocaribe. Not only did the Venezuelan program enable them to meet their energy needs, but it empowered them to begin developing their economies more independently of the United States, which has long been the dominant power in the region.

For many years, the United States failed to offer alternatives to Petrocaribe. While Venezuela emerged as a powerful counterweight to U.S. power in the Caribbean, officials in Washington faced the possibility that formerly dependent countries would break free from the U.S. orbit.

With its influence waning, the United States eventually developed its own energy program. In 2014, the Obama administration introduced the Caribbean Energy Security Initiative, which offered Caribbean countries technical........

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